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10 things you should know about the Cold War

60 years ago, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill addressed Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Lately, historians have designated this event as the official start of the Cold War. The confrontation between the socialist and capitalist blocs determined the entire future history of the world up to the present day.

1. Geopolitics, not ideology

The Cold war was a profoundly geopolitical conflict, not an ideological one. From the perspective of the leading German political theorist Carl Schmitt, the global confrontation between the East and West was the result of a geopolitical struggle between the Land and the Sea. The Soviet Union was a tellurocratic pole, the center of the Land civilization. The US was the center of the Sea civilization. Anglo-Saxon political theorists agreed with him, including Sir Halford Mackinder.

The USSR embodied the features of a typical tellurocratic civilization: control over vast areas of land, closed militarized society, heroic ethics, and the subordination of the economy to politics. The United States is a typical thalassocratic power: an open society, a democracy, has control over the world's oceans, and has a trading system. In geopolitical terms the confrontation between Russia and the United States would still have taken place, even if the communist ideology had not been established in Russia.

2. It wasn’t something unusual

This type of confrontation was not uncommon in the history of the world. Earlier, the Russian and British empires vying for control of the Middle East, Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan led the geopolitical struggle for life and death. In ancient times Rome (tellurocratic pole) and the maritime trading empire of Carthage fightedt for supremacy in the Mediterranean.

3. The global conflict

The principal difference of the Cold War and other conflicts of this kind became its global nature. All nations of the world were involved in the confrontation. A fierce struggle for influence on the members of the so-called "Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)" was waged. As a result, the conflict evolved into a "zero-sum" game: if one side wins in an area – they will inevitably lose in another.

In Western historiography there is the idea that it was the Soviet Union who started the Cold War. However, the facts tell a different story. In 1945, the British Armed Forces' Joint Planning Staff elaborated two related plans for a conflict between their Western Allies and the Soviet Union. Both were ordered by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and were given the common code name ‘Operation Unthinkable’.

After the end of the Potsdam Conference, US General Dwight D. Eisenhower, under the directions of President Harry S. Truman, established Plan Totality. It presumed a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union with 20 to 30 atomic bombs. It earmarked 20 Soviet cities for obliteration in the first strike: Moscow, Gorki, Kuybyshev, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Saratov, Kazan, Leningrad, Baku, Tashkent, Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Tagil, Magnitogorsk, Molotov, Tbilisi, Stalinsk, Grozny, Irkutsk, and Yaroslavl. Recently, the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan to horrify its eastern ally and subjugate it to the US’ world domination.

At this time the USSR did not prepare aggressive plans against its British-American allies, and tried to negotiate the future sharing of power. The Atlanticist pole rejected these accords, choosing to strive for world domination instead.

5. America striving for world hegemony as the trigger of the conflict

On the eve of the Cold War, the United States’ political theorists expressed the need to struggle for global hegemony. Plans to build a unipolar world were voiced long before the Soviet-American confrontation. The same circle of Anglo-American globalists, linked to the Round Table Society, played a huge role in the development of the American Council on Foreign Relations and Royal Institute on International Affairs. The CFR chairman, Isaiah Bowman, endorsed the idea of US hegemony, along with geo-strategists Nicholas Spykman and Robert Strausz-Hupe. The case of James Burnham is exemplar, a former Trotskyite who became an ardent supporter of world government and the founding of the CIA. He openly called for an "American Empire" and can be considered as a predecessor to the Neoconservatives.

6. The geopolitical distribution of nuclear weapons

The geopolitical confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union was clearly demonstrated by the distribution of nuclear weapons in the framework of the traditional nuclear triad in both superpowers. The US, which controlled the world’s oceans, had a large part of their nuclear missiles on submarines. The Soviet Union, on the contrary, had them on the land. It was in the Soviet Union where the unique railway and road nuclear complexes were created, discreetly moving through the vast territory of the USSR. Analogical projects in the USA did not pass into service.

7. The loss of the role of Europe's geopolitical pole

The Cold War was a product of the global balance of power that was established following the Second World War. The main result for Europe was the loss of the leading position of the European powers in the global arena. The fate of Europe was decided by the non-European powers: the United States and the Soviet Union.

n the face of Nazi Germany and its European allies, continental Europe tried to act as an independent geopolitical pole, defying the US and the UK’s thalassocracy, as well as the largest Eurasian power - the USSR. This decision turned out to be suicidal. As a result, Germany itself and the whole of Europe were divided between the US and the USSR.

8. The third world comes to the stage

Paradoxically, the Cold War increased the importance of the third world countries in world politics. It is significant that the term itself has its origins in this period. The fall of the geopolitical weight of Europe and the policies of the USSR and the United States contributed to the destruction of the European colonial empires. Both superpowers were fighting to influence the free countries, which some used to their advantage, maneuvering between the two poles. The Non-Alignment Movement emerged as an institution that manifested the geopolitical aspirations of these countries.

9. The role of mondialist structures in the US’ victory in the Cold War

The main role in the US’ victory in the Cold War was played by an effective "fifth column" inside the Soviet Union, which formed the ideology of Perestroika. Its core was the Institute of System Research, which was led by Dzherman Gvishiani - the son in-law of Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin. The Institute of System Research was the Soviet branch of the globalist Club of Rome.
Leading Soviet analytical and research centers were in contact with foreign colleagues, and also focused on the ideology of the "convergence" of the two systems, which later formed the basis of Gorbachev's ideology. This pro-western part of the Soviet establishment was protected by the KGB head Yuri Andropov (later General Secretary of the Communist party), whose inner circle created the plans to reform the Soviet Union in a capitalist way, and negotiate with the US the future spheres of influence in the world.

This part of the Soviet elite understood the confrontation as an ideological, not a geopolitical one. And it was wrong. The US supported these changes in a way that the ideological change led to the collapse of the Soviet union as a powerful geopolitical pole.

10. What's next?

As the events of the last decade show, the US’ victory in the Cold War turned out to be temporary. Already in the early 2000’s, the BRICS countries have declared themselves as leaders of a new world order - a multipolar one. The unipolar world was indeed a unipolar moment (in the words of Charles Krauthammer).